CRAYON COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE BLOG

We will look back on 2024 as the year that artificial intelligence revolutionized competitive enablement. We have finally hit the critical paradigm shift. The changes weren’t just about advancing ...

Since its launch a month ago, Crayon Sparks has had an outsized impact on how Crayon customers compete, enabling them to transform data overload into effortless, actionable enablement. Sparks By the ...

In today’s business landscape, hyper-competition is the norm. A staggering 94% of companies report that their markets have become more competitive over the past year, a trend that has compounded over ...

As summer winds down and the out of office replies become less frequent, companies are in full on planning mode for 2025. While there are many inputs that go into annual planning and setting revenue ...

In a world where business competition is fiercer than ever, having a strategic edge is no longer optional—it's essential. Our recent webinar, "Elevate Your Competitive Enablement Strategy with Crayon ...

Rachel Pangburn and Garrett Denney—who lead competitive intelligence at RF-SMART and Crayon, respectively—are well-versed in the act of presenting CI program results to senior leaders. They’re so ...

In 2024, it’s quite possible that your CI team has gotten smaller, or the amount of time you can dedicate to the program has decreased. Organizations are trying to do more with less, but while ...

In a perfect world, you can see the future. You know what your competitors are going to do months before they actually do it. I wish I could tell you that I have a portal to this alternate universe. ...

A few days ago, we started collecting responses for our 2024 State of Competitive Intelligence survey. As I’m writing this, the sample size is still very small (42 responses), but the early results ...

Champions (a.k.a. advocates or evangelists) are coworkers who encourage their peers to consume the content you produce. They are essential to the success of your competitive intelligence program. So ...

Your company has two kinds of competitors: direct and indirect. You know the former. Those are the competitors that your sales team goes head-to-head with every single day. Meanwhile, an indirect ...

Being a CI team of 1 in a saturated market is a tough job. Ideally, you'd like to keep tabs on every competitor, but you don't have nearly enough bandwidth to do that. You need to prioritize. You ...

For nearly a decade, Crayon has been helping people like you build excellent compete programs—programs that increase win rates and influence executive decision-making. We decided to take everything ...

For nearly a decade, Crayon has been helping people like you build excellent compete programs—programs that increase win rates and influence executive decision-making. We decided to take everything ...

For nearly a decade, Crayon has been helping people like you build excellent compete programs—programs that increase win rates and influence executive decision-making. We decided to take everything ...

For nearly a decade, Crayon has been helping people like you build excellent compete programs—programs that increase win rates and influence executive decision-making. We decided to take everything ...

This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, Fletcher. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more! So, you've started your Compete program... What more should you do? As a CI ...

When I was a kid, car commercials puzzled me. I remember asking my dad: Why do they make these? No one is gonna get off the couch and buy a Camry after watching a Toyota commercial. Which is true — ...

This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, Goldpan. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more! Win/loss analysis isn’t a nice-to-have. Understanding your buyers and prospects is ...

Slack is the communication backbone of tens of thousands of companies around the world because while it’s true that knowledge is power, we all know that the true power comes only once that knowledge ...

This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, PSP Enterprises. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more! “Let’s talk about how I can use GPT to help me with competitive intelligence.” ...

Competitive intelligence leaders are often so focused on improving the content of their battlecards that they overlook a simple yet vital responsibility: reminding their sales teams that the ...

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Mimi An and August Jackson — who run competitive intelligence (CI) at Akamai and Deltek, respectively — about the top insights from Crayon’s 2023 ...

This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, Atlantic Intelligence. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more! What separates competitive from competitor intelligence? Simply put, ...

This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, Satrix Solutions. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more! You’ve probably heard the saying, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” It’s ...

As a Customer Success Manager here at Crayon, I have seen over 100 CI programs in action. Nearly all of them have the same success criteria: “Enabling the sales team to win competitive deals and ...

Battlecards are one of the most popular sales enablement materials businesses create today, with two-thirds of competitive intelligence teams saying that they regularly maintain competitive ...

Tesla, Rivian, and Toyota all make electric vehicles, but the way they perceive their respective roles in the EV market (and the way prospective purchasers perceive each brand) couldn’t be more ...

Assembling a team takes more than just finding candidates with the right keywords on their resumes — company culture, soft skills, and communication styles are key to putting together the right ...

Imagine you lead the intelligence function at a CRM software company. One day, you notice that your closest competitor has recently published a couple blog posts about contracts and document ...

After watching the new Amazon-meets-Middle-Earth show last week (it’s good!) I decided to watch the extended cuts of the Lord of the Rings movies. 10+ hours of whimsy and brimstone, what a delightful ...

Imagine waking up and finding yourself in the driver’s seat of a car, parked on the side of a road that you don’t recognize. You’re alone, and your phone is nowhere to be found. A stranger walks up ...

When it comes to competitive analysis, scope is everything. If you’re just starting out, you might go broad and deep on a dozen market stalwarts (like oil painters and SEC tailgaters, building a base ...

Few things are more intimidating than the prospect of an audit. You know, those mildly invasive processes in which someone from an SEO consultancy or the IRS or some other authoritative three letter ...

What does the compete department at your company look like? Is competitive intelligence the responsibility of one person? Two people? A whole team? Odds are, your CI program is just a fraction of one ...

The Olympic podium. Bookish teens jockeying for valedictorian. The couples on the cusp of a $50K payday on British reality TV phenomenon Love Island. There is nothing more fundamentally human than ...

A couple weeks ago, when we sat down with Andy McCotter-Bicknell and Fouad Benyoub—leaders of competitive intelligence programs at ClickUp and Everbridge, respectively—we were expecting to talk about ...

Competitive deals are emotional. How could they not be? You’re in sales because you like to win and make money. Competitors get in the way of both. I don’t care how senior you are—when a competitor ...

A lot of smart, creative people have taken the lead on competitive intelligence and found themselves trapped in a vicious cycle: It’s not an infinite cycle, of course—it does, eventually, come to an ...

There’s a lot of things I should do. I should stretch in the morning. I should go to the dentist every six months. I should stay off Twitter for the rest of my life. But just because I should do ...

A few weeks ago, we showed you how to make the case for an official competitive intelligence program. We showed you, in other words, how to convince an executive decision-maker (EDM) that CI is a ...

So, you’ve gone through all the work of implementing competitive intelligence. You’re off to the races — tracking, analyzing, and activating valuable intel left and right… now what? Implementing a ...

To create a competitive culture is to convince your colleagues that competitive intelligence is essential—to shift the perception of CI from nice-to-have to need-to-have. What does that mean? It ...

9,932 As of 2022, there are 9,932 martech solutions according to Scott Brinker’s latest marketing technology landscape. From email marketing to social media monitoring to ABM and everything in ...

Things could be going better. You’re working hard to deliver on the competitive intelligence requests that come through your inbox, but as far as you can tell, very few people are consuming the ...

We touched on it in our guide to penetration pricing, and today we go deep on one of the most polarizing pricing strategies out there: loss leader. In this post, we’ll define loss leader pricing, ...

Canada is south of Detroit. There’s nothing you can do with this information, but it’s pretty cool, right? Sometimes, learning for the sake of learning is perfectly appropriate. But when it comes to ...

Trust me. We get it. Your competitors are always on the move–from constant website updates to new product features and maybe even new funding rounds. That’s why companies find Crayon’s Competitive ...

Sometimes it pays to be the new kid on the block. Every few years it seems as if there is a hot new role that catches like wildfire in organizations of all sizes. Can you remember the days before ...

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of capturing, analyzing, and activating information related to your competitive landscape. Done right, CI empowers everyone at your organization to make ...

Your product team has spent the last 18 months cookin’ up something shiny. Prospects are going to love it. There’s just one problem: You’re entering a saturated market. There’s the old guard. The ...

Q: How much is a product worth? A: Whatever people will pay for it. In some cases, that’s nothing (not great!). In others, it means charging a premium because, well, you can. Today, we’re focusing on ...

Over the past decade, marketing organizations at enterprise companies have grown from being perceived as cost centers built around soft metrics to being highly respected drivers of measurable ...

I have been working in the B2B SaaS world for over five years now. As a competitive intelligence (CI) professional, I help companies define and build their CI programs so that they can be one step ...

Time and time again, companies’ yearning desire to be the best gives way to fierce rivalries. For some rival companies, the feud is public-facing – think comparative advertisements and competitor ...

Venmo. Walmart. Warby Parker. Xfinity. Supreme. Apple. Obviously, each of these companies is a massive success story. But as it turns out, the drivers of their success—although not without ...

Competitive advertising is a well-established practice in our modern media landscape. As the intensity of competition rises, so, too, does the difficulty of earning and maintaining the attention of ...

Today is a great day because you’ve just been hired to spearhead a competitive intelligence (CI) program at your company. When you’re starting a new initiative and integrating a new practice into an ...

As we head into the New Year, many of us are deep in planning, strategy brainstorm sessions, and goal-setting. For competitive intelligence (CI) practitioners, there are many elements to building ...

Though we've only a grainy film to guide us, it is likely that Neil Armstrong took a very deliberate approach before making his "one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind" when he ...

The new year is right around the corner. If you haven’t already, you’re likely about to kick-off your 2021 planning. A lot has happened in 2020 that has impacted businesses across the globe and ...

The cool thing about working at Crayon (besides incredible dog and cat Slack channels) is that I get to talk to Product Marketers a whole lot—whether it’s on LinkedIn, in the awesome Product ...

In Part I of this blog, I addressed what to look for before engaging with a 3rd-party firm to discuss their offerings. Part II today covers the broad range of tools and services our team uses to add ...

Every week a new vendor comes knocking on my door with a sales pitch for their – fill in the blank – market research, competitive intelligence (CI) research, industry news, web scraping, expert ...

Competitive Intelligence (CI) is one of the most critical methodologies we need to fully understand our markets. Traditionally, CI has been conducted by collecting, analyzing, and sharing single ...

All too frequently, competitive intelligence (CI) information resides in many homes. The process of collecting competitive intelligence can be time consuming when the information lives across ...

Just took a new role in competitive intelligence? Congrats! Forming a new competitive intelligence (CI) initiative for your organization? Fantastic! It’s great to see the business investing in this ...

There is no adequate way to express the effect COVID-19 has had on society. It’s changed the way we live and the way we work. Competitive intelligence (CI) might seem like an “extra” in the time of ...

There are only so many hours in a day, and there are a lot of tasks that marketing teams tackle on a daily basis. When we think about competitive intelligence (CI), we most commonly think about its ...

The foundational goals of a competitive intelligence program are to enable the organization to better understand their market, make stronger strategic decisions, and ultimately increase revenue. But, ...

With the continuous advancement of technology, the Competitive Intelligence (CI) industry has seen many changes over the last five to ten years. Technology aside, we’ve seen many trends arise that ...

Competitive Intelligence (CI) is growing. According to the recent State of Competitive Intelligence Report, more than half (57%) of businesses have CI teams of two or more dedicated CI professionals, ...

Competitive Intelligence (CI) is a critical part of a smart business strategy. Even still, Competitive Intelligence is questioned by those unfamiliar with the process. In particular, we often hear ...

Baking a cake and crafting your competitive intelligence (CI) program surprisingly have a lot of overlap. If you’ve ever watched an episode of the Great British Baking Show, you’ll know there’s no ...

Competitive intelligence (CI) skills need to be honed and sharpened regularly. The field of competitive intelligence changes constantly, with new tactics, strategies, and technologies popping up and, ...

With every new initiative comes its own set of challenges. Creating and executing a competitive intelligence (CI) program isn’t always easy, no matter how experienced the professional or how robust ...

One of the hardest problems for many competitive intelligence (CI) professionals is how to measure the impact of programs that they put into place. In fact, less than half (44%) of CI teams have ...

Competitive intelligence (CI) is not a new business function. The way businesses and CI practitioners are approaching competitive intelligence, however, is changing quickly. We surveyed 1,000+ CI ...

Choosing the best competitive intelligence (CI) solution for your business isn’t always a quick and easy process. To ensure that the solution you choose meets all of your needs and delivers results, ...

When it comes to market research, it pays to plan. Although many organizations wing it and base their marketing campaigns and company strategy on their gut, the best-performing companies rely on ...

When your competitive landscape is constantly changing - with new competitors, new products, mergers, marketing campaigns, and more - it can be easy to fall into a reactive mode. An event happens, ...

Competitive intelligence (CI) surfaces insights that can - and should - be leveraged across the business. Competitive intelligence can be translated into tactical activities as well as strategic ...

Bootstrapping a hacky solution to a complicated competitive intelligence (CI) problem is enticing. But, as a company grows, free software trials and bootstrap fixes wear thin. Your limited ...

Competitive Intelligence (CI) has traditionally been a manual process. Competitive intelligence professionals and market analysts spend a significant amount of time capturing, analyzing, and acting ...

Ten years ago, the digital footprints of companies were small. So small, a complete digital footprint only included a company website and maybe a Twitter profile. Today, there are many social media ...

Business Intelligence (BI) and Competitive Intelligence (CI) are both critical for improving the performance and success rate for your organization. While both are different in practice, when put ...

You won’t be able to see success within your organization unless your sales and marketing teams are aligned. This is true when it comes to goals, initiatives, and strategies—including your ...

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, is plagiarism the laziest form of flattery? When you work in a highly competitive industry, competitors copying each other is a common occurrence. How ...

Many businesses struggle with measuring the impact of competitive intelligence. In fact, less than half of businesses have established key performance indicators (KPIs) for CI. The 52% of companies ...

It’s no secret that your time is valuable. When you do your job, you don’t have time to waste, and you try to avoid investing in activities that won’t give you results. So, why should competitive ...

We have probably never met. Even so, I am confident you have a stellar background and a proven track record of success in competitive intelligence. Or, if you’re new to competitive intelligence, you ...

Considering your company’s place in your industry is a vital action. Opening your mind to your competition’s chief offerings and honestly setting your own product alongside theirs surfaces pivotal ...

The following topic is discussed more in depth in "Democratizing Competitive Intelligence to Drive Impact Across the Organization", published in the Summer Edition of Competitive Intelligence ...

No matter the size of the organization, every business should have a competitive intelligence strategy. Larger organizations will typically have a well-rounded strategy team to handle their ...

When I speak with executives from various departments and companies across the spectrum, I’ll often ask the question: “What are your competitors doing?” Silence. It’s awkward. Executives glance ...

Millions of businesses understand what’s happening internally, but they’re blind to what’s happening outside the four walls of their company. Most companies have awesome data on their own marketing ...

"We are disruptors in our space, we don't have direct competitors." Many times I have heard that statement, especially from startups, and it has been followed by the refrain that looking at ...